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Second beta version of Tine 2.0 2008/10 released

Tine 2.0 2008/10 beta-2 solves internationalization problems and layout problems in the Internet Explorer. 

The Tine 2.0 project[1] released the second beta version of their 2008/10 Release (codename 'Summer 2008'). The online demo[2] got updated to the latest version as well. This version is a pure bugfix release and has no new features. 

Thanks to the translators, problems and uncertainties in the internationalization system got solved. With beta-2 the freeze of the english original strings begins, so that translators can finalize their work. The current translation state can be reviewed at [3]. 

Layout problems for the Internet Explorer (versions 6 and 7) got addressed in this release. Moreover compatibility to the upcoming Firefox JIT-Compiler got ensured. 

A full list of changes and bugfixes is to be found in the changelog[4]. 

Anyone is invited to download the software from the project page www.tine20.org, test it and report problems and bugs. It has to be emphasized that these packages are intended for testing purpose only and not for productive service. 

If no critical bugs are found in this second beta, the first release candidate will be released on the 15th of october. 

[1] http://www.tine20.org/

[2] http://demo.tine20.org/

[3] http://www.tine20.org/langStats/

[4] http://www.tine20.org/bugtracker/changelog_page.php

[5] http://www.tine20.org/bugtracker/roadmap_page.php

Press Contact for Tine 2.0

Cornelius Weiss 

Metaways Infosystems GmbH 

Pickhuben 2-4, D-20457 Hamburg 

E-Mail: c.weiss@metaways.de 

Web: www.metaways.de 

Tel: +49 (0)40 317031-45 

Fax: +49 (0)40 317031-945 

What Is Tine 2.0? 

Tine 2.0 is a web based online groupware system, based on free and open sources which is sponsored by the german IT-company Metaways Infosystems GmbH. 

Working with Tine 2.0 is fun and eases the workday life because it activates synergies through high acceptance in your whole organisation. The system leads to a more productive business organisation and communication: Addresses, Appointments, Tasks and other data could be approved, shared, distributed and appreciated easily. 

The high acceptance is achieved by providing an easy to use interface and enjoyable user experience which is ensured by the close collaboration of software engineers and usability experts within the project. 

Tine 2.0 is an open source business collaboration software covering CRM and ERP aspects. The Server component is build as a service provider where the clients run as Rich Internet Applications in the any web browser. 

Tine 2.0 was started by former eGroupWare core developers which now work fulltime on Tine 2.0. The efforts are at the moment fully backed by Metaways GmbH. 

Metaways 

Metaways is the well-known full IT service provider located in Hamburg's aspiring old freeport area. Spread out among several data centers, Metaways provides highly available internet sites and business software for customers in Germany and abroad as well. Over 40 experienced computer specialists supply software applications, shop systems, CMS and business-software-solutions around Typo3, Zend Framwork, Magento and other wide spread software products always focussing on usability, security and scalability. 

As such the summer release will come with the following applications:

In the milestone which was already passed last week, a new relations management for the records of the different applications has been introduced. Moreover the window communication of the dialogs has been improved. Unlike many other web applications, Tine 2.0 deals with real brother windows and does only occasionally use modal javascript windows. This is particularly suitable for owners of big screens, who can drag windows off the main screen area  now.

Anyone is invited to download and test the packages build for this milestone, downloadable form the project page www.tine20.org. It has to be emphasized that these packages are of beta-quality intended for testing purpose only and not for productive service.

The roadmap for the next milestone contains the development of a sophisticated filtering system, based on a concept similar the intelligent Folders in Apples email. In addition an automatic change tracking and history logging framework will be introduced. On its bases, it will be possible to trace all changes made to an arbitrary data record.

What Is Tine 2.0?

Working with Tine 2.0 is fun and eases the workaday life cause it activates synergies through high acceptance in your whole organisation. This is achieved by providing an easy to use interface and enjoyable user experience on the basis of a stable, secure and scalable infrastructure.

Tine 2.0 is an open source business collaboration software covering groupware, CRM and ERP aspects. The Server component is build as a service provider where the client run as Rich Internet Applications in the any web-browser.

Tine 2.0 was started by former eGroupWare core developers which now work full-time on Tine 2.0. The efforts are fully backed by Metaways GmbH.

Metaways

Metaways it the well-known internet service provider located in Hamburg's aspiring old freeport area. Spread out among several data centers, Metaways provides highly available internet sites and business software for customers in Germany and abroad as well. Over 40 experienced computer specialists supply solutions around Typo3 Zend-Framwork and eGroupWare, focussing on usability, security and scalability.

Metaways Infosystems GmbH - Sitz: D-22967 Tremsbüttel
Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Ahrensburg HRB 4508
Geschäftsführung: Hermann Thaele, Lüder-H.Thaele  

Supported by the Metaways GmbH located in Hamburg (Germany) they have created a brand new product intended to push the standards for business collaboration software regarding usability, scalability and security. 

Thanks to their consistent orientation to the user's needs, Tine 2.0 makes business collaboration easier and more enjoyable.

The Software combines groupware, CRM and ERP into one system and is with that, useful for the the whole company from the field staff to the back office members.

Synergies, which the whole company profits from,  are being created through its deft linkage between the different components, and the collective work on one master data source.

Tine 2.0 is based on a flexible Server / Client Architecture with open APIs. The Program can be used by any modern web browser. This makes the resource-intensive installation process on each  employee's computer superfluous.

Through the use of cutting edge "Rich Internet Applications" (RIA) technology Tine 2.0 can be used like any normal desktop application, so that each and every co-worker learns to use it efficiently. As the software can be accessed by any internet-device out there, Tine 2.0 offers the highest level of flexibility. Needless to say, due to sophisticated permission managements, all co-workers only have access to the data they are allowed to have.

As an open-source program Tine 2.0 can be used and extended free of charge by anyone. Due to the use of the widespread programming languages PHP and Javascript, it's extremely easy to adopt the software to one's own needs.

For the first time the now presented version offers insight into the internals of Tine 2.0. The following have been realized so far.

All of the above-mentioned functions are fully useable, but productive usage is not recommended yet. For further updates, news and background information please check www.tine20.org.

Press Contact

Cornelius Weiss
Metaways Infosystems GmbH
Pickhuben 2-4, D-20457 Hamburg
E-Mail: c.weiss@metaways.de
Web: www.metaways.de
Tel: +49 (0)40 317031-45
Fax: +49 (0)40 317031-945

Metaways

Metaways it the well-known internet service provider located in Hamburg's aspiring old freeport area. Spread out among several data centers, Metaways provides highly available internet sites and business software for customers in Germany and abroad as well. Over 40 experienced computer specialists supply solutions around Typo3 Zend-Framwork and eGroupWare, focussing on usability, security and scalability.

Metaways Infosystems GmbH - Sitz: D-22967 Tremsbüttel
Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Ahrensburg HRB 4508
Geschäftsführung: Hermann Thaele, Lüder-H.Thaele

• Under the hood we upgraded our libraries to Zend Framework 1.5 and Ext JS 2.1. The new Zend Framework comes with important enhancements in the Database component and Ext JS brings further well known desktop user interface elements to the browser.
• The source code documentation was massively improved. This makes day to day coding a lot faster and shortens the time new contributors need to commit. According to ohloh.net we are one of the 10% best documented php open source projects ââ?¬â?? a fact that we are really proud of.
• For automated tests we chose the PHPUnit framework because it ensures that the classes do what they were intended to do. Moreover we use unit-tests for documentation. In doubt about a classes performance, we just have to take a look at the tests. This is much easier than to search a piece within the code.

New Features
Initially Milestone 3 should not comprise new functions; nevertheless we implemented some useful features:

• Tine 2.0 received an own setup. The installation starts with an empty database using the setup.php to create all tables and initial data needed. Depending on the configuration you can either start with an empty system or import data from an existing groupware server.
• The new ldap authentication driver allows using Tine 2.0 within an existing ldap infrastructure. You just have to assign the admin rights to an existing group in the ldap tree.
• Last but not least Tine 2.0 was connected with the asterisk phone server. At the first step it is possible to initiate a call directly out of the address book. As Tine 2.0 uses a service structure itself, it is very easy to integrate Tine 2.0 as a service or to integrate other services in it.

So far for the update, thank you all for the enormous interest in Tine 2.0. Please keep us provided with your ideas and feedback which help us redefining collaboration open minded and open sourced.

Your Tine 2.0 dev team

This tuesday is a sad day for all users and developers of eGroupWare, but mainly for eGroupWare.org project itself. We didn't want this split and are sorry for the inconvenience this brings to our friends in the eGroupWare community.

Obviously we weren't able to transport our ideas and concepts to the decisive people in eGroupWare.

Nevertheless, after 5 month of active development with up to date concepts and techniques we are still convinced that we are doing the right thing.

Hence Tine 2.0 development consequently continues, and we are quite positive to deliver a stable open source collaboration solution with an outstanding user experience in a intermediate-term.

We are grateful for all the support we got so far. If you like to join the Tine 2.0 community, please find us in our forums.

First of all, we are very thankful for the enormous amount of positive feedback we got for our effort to increase usability and stability of eGroupWare.

eGroupWare 2.0 Project Page

We are glad to announce the immediate availability of a site dedicated to the eGroupWare 2.0 effort:

www.egroupware20.org.

This will be the main platform for information and discussions about eGroupWare 2.0. We documented quite a lot in the 'learn' section so far, and now we can't wait that the forum gets filled with life. We hope you enjoy this platform as much as we do.

Current State

Generally we are amazed by the speed the project developed. We already passed milestone 1 which we hoped to reach by the end of this year.

With the power of the Zend framework it was quite easy to implement the database back-end, support for filters and validation of user data. With the help of Ext-JS it's also quite easy to build desktop like applications. So we are glad to say that we have all ingredients to build a very responsive groupware with an outstanding user-experience.

Great ascent was made in the user-interface. We now have all concepts ready to create desktop class applications. If you visit the demo please notice the contextual toolbars with enabled and disabled actions, try your right mouse-button and be astonished by the speed of paging and searching.

Many thanks to the Ext-JS team who provided an excellent foundation and helped out in our process of learning to develop desktop-class applications.

And guess what? It works in FF, Konqueror, Safari, Opera and IE

A great step forward is the uncoupling of access-control-rights from the ownership of records we made. With this it's possible to create shared folders (e.g. a shared addressbook) and assign access-rights to the folder, which are valid for each containing item independent from the rights of a certain creator. We are quite optimistic that administrators will love this new degree of freedom when modeling a groupware solution.

For data safety we introduced a simple concurrency management, which rejects saving of records which got changed during the edit process. The user is asked to review his changes before he attempts to save them. This is a great advance compared to the current 1.4 approach where the last one who saves just 'wins'.

As a final note in this section it's worth to explain the agile approach we use for developing. Agile programming means that the software makes an evolution and has frequent cycles of re-factoring. We evaluate our main concepts with the help of 3 applications. First the addressbook as an easy list application. Secondly a calendar which is mainly based on object composition, and thirdly with a CRM application which relies on linking of data. In the next weeks we will add a fourth app to this portfolio, the tasks, to cover all traditional groupware fields. However, we will wait with more applications until the evolution of these applications leads to major and well tested main concepts.

What's Next

We do not only want to create a more usable groupware, we also want to make eGroupWare more safe and stable. Therefore along with normal day to day developing for Milestone 2 and 3 we will start with unit-testing and history logging which was originally considered after Milestone 3.

We think that it is a precondition to have a fully functional history logging and a more advanced concurrency management, before starting to integrate interfaces like CalDav and SyncML. In our projects the absence of this core features in egw1.x has turned out to be one of the major pitfalls and showstoppers. Currently each record is as it is, and nobody has an idea how it came to this point which is more than unsatisfactory especially in large installations.

Database Brand Compatibility

eGroupWare uses PDO as database adapter and Zend_DB as database abstraction layer. Thus in principle it's database independent when only using simple database actions.

However, for a fully featured and performant groupware it's not adequate only to use trivial sql statements. In the current egw1.x code we made enormous efforts to support much database brands. This makes the code complicated on the one hand, and on the other hand we abandon many great features of the specific database vendors. But most sadly we have to sum up honestly, despite these efforts and restrictions, egw1.x only runs adequate and fully featured with the mysql back-end.

So what lesson do we learn from that for egw2? eGroupWare2.0 is designed to support multiple back-ends. For accounts this is sql and ldap. For the addressbook this is sql, ldap and different web-services. For the calendar its sql and ical-files.

This being said, it's clear that we see different sql database brands also as different back-ends. We at Metaways concentrate on the mysql back-end, as we are a service provider for large scale mysql databases. We have much mysql knowledge in-house and work closely together with mysql consultants. Therefor we can write highly optimized and performant mysql code. The back-end concept gives us the freedom to include support for other brands when we or others need it. Again these back-ends than could be highly optimized and performant.

Versioning Strategy

While it's confusing for users that a version 2.0 exists along the current 1.x versions we call the effort itself eGroupWare 2.0 and start with version 0.x. So it should be clear that eGroupWare and eGroupware 2.0 are two different products of the same project.

However the eGroupWare community has not yet officially decided if the outcome of the eGroupWare 2.0 effort really becomes the logic replacement for the current egw1.x code-line as a long-term goal.

We plan to request a vote on this topic in the first quarter of 2008. As we had a lot of positive feedback from the developers community so far, it's likely that our plans come true to integrate our effort officially into the project.

So far for the update, thank you all for the enormous interest in eGroupWare 2.0. Please understand that we can't answer any single mail and therefore send updates like this from time to time.

Your eGroupWare 2.0 team!

What Is eGroupWare2.0?

eGroupWare 2.0 is an effort to increase usability and stability of eGroupWare, one of the leading open-source groupware projects.

By working on this effort it became clear, that the best strategy for improving eGroupWare would be a rewrite in a separate code-base like KDE 4 and Typo3 did before.

The eGroupWare 2.0 effort was started by 2 of the 3 most active eGroupWare developers which currently work full-time on the project. All this efforts are currently fully backed by Metaways GmbH which pays these developers.